Target: Denver FBI, #1

By Lisa Phillips

A Prequel Story

 

Special Agent Liam Conners is the only witness to his neighbor's abduction: the Chloroform Killer has struck again. But when his neighbor, Andrea James, returns from a business trip, they realize the killer's mistake—her sister has been abducted in her place. Now the killer is coming for Andrea, and Liam and his partner are the only ones standing in the way. ​Can they catch the killer and protect the target? 

** CHRISTIAN ROMANTIC MYSTERY/SUSPENSE Novella **

• Language: English
• Publisher: Two Dogs Publishing, LLC.
• Release date: Oct 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201760106

Lisa Phillips

A British ex-pat, Lisa loves high-stakes stories of mayhem and disaster where you can find made-for-each-other love that always ends in happily ever after. Lisa leads worship with her husband at their church. They have two kids and an all-black Airedale.

Book preview

Target

Target

Denver FBI - Book 1

Lisa Phillips

First Edition March 2014

Published by Lisa Phillips

---

Copyright © 2014 Lisa Phillips All rights reserved.

---

This book is a work of fiction. All characters and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental. Any references to real people, historical events, or locales, are used fictitiously.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the author, except for review purposes.

---

Cover art by Kristine McCord

Photos from Shutterstock

Denver Cityscape - gary yim / Shutterstock.com

Vellum flower icon Created with Vellum

You wouldn’t be holding this book if it wasn’t for my girls: Becky Avella, Heather Humrichouse,

Hilarey Johnson, and Kristine McCord.

Not only fantastic writers in their own right, they’re also the best critique group in the world.

---

Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Bait

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Also by Lisa Phillips

About the Author

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book I had to contact the FBI. It’s safe to say they exceeded my expectations in both the time it took them to get back to me (literally, days) and the wealth of information they supplied.

---

Any errors you may find in this book are due to the fact that story is king, and honestly,

reality isn’t always all that awesome anyway.

One

The sweat on Special Agent Liam Conners’ forehead froze. A tan colored van was parked between two street lamps, out front of his neighbor’s apartment across from the clubhouse. The door to the gym clicked shut behind him and his breath puffed out as a cloud.

The rear of the van was wide open. A five-eleven man in a heavy overcoat, dark pants and black boots stepped off the curb with a bundle over one shoulder. On the man’s head was a knit cap, but Liam couldn’t see what shade it was, just that the color was bright.

Liam stepped out. It was probably nothing. Why did he tense up at the slightest thing? No wonder he couldn’t sleep. He grasped the damp towel around his neck and the door to the gym at his apartment complex clicked behind him, shutting out the light from inside. It was two a.m., but the sweat-session hadn’t done anything to settle his nerves. After a long day, the last thing he needed was an equally long night of sleeplessness. And yet here he was.

The van man shifted his weight and dumped what was over his shoulder inside the vehicle. Liam’s foot hit the pavement before he even registered that what had been on the man’s shoulder was a body.

His neighbor was being abducted.

Liam ran. He might not know her name, but he knew her.

For some reason, in a complex of a hundred or so apartments, she seemed to be there anytime he was coming or going. The woman had dark red hair that would have been called carrot top in elementary school, and a slender body. She probably had an amazing smile, but he’d never caught it. She was kind of serious—as in, all the time. In fact, Liam had never even seen her look happy, or anything other than completely neutral.

The back doors of the van slammed shut. Liam’s towel went flying as he sprinted across the grass hill in the center island of the complex’s main street.

The shorts and t-shirt he wore to work out weren’t much protection against the frigid air of February in Colorado, but he barely felt it. Instead his mind washed with the things he’d seen at work, hunting down degenerates and crazies.

Denver wasn’t better or worse than any of the cities he’d lived in. Not even D.C., where he’d grown up. And no one, least of all a woman who desperately needed to laugh, should be at the mercy of any of the criminals he’d ever met.

He jumped the curb onto pavement and the man opened the driver’s door.

Freeze!

Still running, Liam reached for his weapon, which was back in his apartment, along with his badge…and his cell phone. His nighttime workouts were the one thing he didn’t let work intrude on. Why did he do that?

Nothing deterred the abductor from his task. Not even when a hundred-ninety pounds of frustrated FBI agent bore down on him. He didn’t even turn Liam’s way; he just climbed in the van.

The door slammed shut, the engine fired and the van sped away. Liam got there in time to grasp the back corner with his fingertips.

Then he was alone in the street outside her apartment, sucking in ice-cold air.

The van had no license plate. It turned the corner without slowing down, tilting so it almost went up on two wheels. A Ford; older model with rust on the edges of the doors.

The front door to her apartment was ajar, so Liam went in and called 9-1-1 from there.

When the cop cars pulled up outside and Sergeant Tucker got out of the first one, Liam’s shoulder blades loosened. His partner kidded him that one of these days he would wind up permanently shrugging from all the tension. But what did she know? Caisey had more issues than the main character in a Kristine McCord novel.

Evening, Special Agent Conners. Sergeant Tucker was a late-fifties African- American career cop he’d met before. The other officer behind him headed over to the clubhouse, probably to rouse the management.

Liam held out his hand. You can just call me Liam, since I’m in my shorts.

Good deal. Sergeant Tucker smiled. Now let’s get started.

He turned to the front door, but stopped and looked at the cop. Swing shift or night shift?

You’re not keeping me from my bed, Conners.

Good. He should probably explain why he was asking. It’s not that I think you’d do a less-than job if you were at the end of a long shift, but—

You have a thing for this girl?

What? No. Liam cleared his throat. No, I don’t.

One of the sergeant’s eyebrows rose. Sure?

She’s my neighbor, but I’ve never even spoken to her.

Liam ignored the sergeant’s measured stare and ran down what had happened. In the end what he had to say didn’t amount to much, and so he led the cops inside and they walked through the apartment.

The living room would have been immaculate had there not been a pizza box on the table with two cold slices left uneaten and a bunch of empty beer bottles. The lamps looked expensive and the coffee table was cherry wood and shined, except for the ring where someone had set a cup down without a coaster. The carpet and walls were standard for all the apartments, but her couch was a deep burgundy and as soft to the touch as it looked. The decorations were simple and elegant, much like the woman herself.

He didn’t like not knowing her name, so he searched in the kitchen and the second bedroom she used as an office—same as he did—until he found an envelope with her name on it.

Andrea James.

It was a simple name for a classy woman, but he liked it.

Liam flicked further down the stack of mail and found a brown envelope with nothing marked on the front. He turned it over and a photo of Andrea clutching a briefcase, walking outside somewhere, and talking on her cell phone slid onto the mail stack.

Sergeant Tucker stuck his head in the room. Got something?

Surveillance photo. Could be the killer sent it to her.

Liam stared at it and the urge to be certain this whole situation wasn’t ten times worse than he thought took over. He strode past the sergeant.

What is it?

Liam stopped in the bedroom doorway. On the pillow was a white square of material, and the room still held the faint odor that was the modus operandi of a serial killer. The same killer Liam and his partner and the rest of the task force had been chasing for months.

Chloroform.

He turned to the sergeant. I need your phone.

Caisey Lyons slammed the dash of her stupid car on the off-chance reasonable force might jog the heater into pumping out something vaguely warm. But she was already pulling into the apartment complex where Liam lived. She parked and lifted her scarf at the front, so it covered her mouth and nose.

What was it about being woken from a deep sleep that made her freezing every single time? It wasn’t even that cold out, just a tad bit chilly, as Grams would say. Caisey’s grandma was British, so she came out with all kinds of phrases that made no sense at all, but she insisted on using them anyway—to the point that Caisey had adopted some of them, too.

She used her key to enter Liam’s apartment and grabbed his cell phone and the wallet that held his badge from the entry table. Seriously. The man had an entry table, for goodness sake. He probably had smoked salmon in his fridge, while hers was full of important things, like chocolate milk and leftover nachos. He probably ate the salmon while he read the girlie- looking paperback that sat next to where he kept his keys.

When she pulled up outside the apartment number he’d given her, Caisey stared for a moment. Not at the cop cars, or the SUV that their boss, Special Agent Burkot, drove. No, she was staring because it was this apartment—the one Liam always glanced at when she picked him up.

Caisey showed her badge and gave her name to the officer. Liam was in the second bedroom, where an agent from IT sat at the desk, working on the computer. The officer who’d been questioning Liam closed his notebook and passed her on the way out, giving her a nod.

Her partner perched on the edge of a neatly organized bookcase that came up to his hip, his